Finally, those whom Bukkvoll (2011: 697–701) labelled the ‘modernists’ are a less homogeneous group that includes notable thinkers like Aleksei Arbatov and Vitalii Shlykov. Broadly speaking, they present a middle ground, where desirable levels of manpower and technology are not considered in the abstract, but in relation to the country’s current demographic and financial possibilities, as well as security requirements. In their view, trouble spots on the country’s peripheries, such as the North Caucasus and Central Asia, are the most immediate security concern. These cannot be dealt with satisfactorily by a mass mobilization military, making improvements in rapid reaction a priority. Advances in technology are not seen as a panacea, but considered important for the maintenance of conventional war-fighting capabilities. The ‘modernists’ views on potential threats from NATO/the West and state actors, such as China, differ, with thinkers affording them various degrees of importance.
The existence of widely diverging views on the changing character of war and the utility of military force in military thinking are neither surprising, nor unique to Russia. When the Cold War ended, Russia, like many other states, was faced with the dilemma of being left with a military configured for a threat environment that no longer existed. It was uncertain what challenges the new international situation would bring in the immediate and longer-term future and what kind of armed forces and doctrines the country needed to deal with them. Ambiguities in Russian thinking on the merits of manpower versus technology, as well as divergences in views on what kind of conflict would dominate in the future, are also reflected in similar debates in the West (Renz 2014: 70–1). The question on how best to make a country’s military suitable to the current and ever-changing security environment continues to be a matter of controversy not only in Russia, and, as long as chance and uncertainty exist, it can never be answered conclusively.
Developments in Russian military thinking are important, because many of the strategists driving these debates are close to the political and military leadership and their ideas inevitably shape military practice. However, the extent to which specific ideas and strands of thinking translate into changes to official military doctrine (discussed further below) is difficult to discern and also likely to change over time. As Bukkvoll noted, during the initial phases of the 2008 modernization programme, which was initiated in the aftermath of the war in Georgia, reforms were driven by the perceived need to improve capabilities required to deal with local conflicts and lower-intensity missions. The influence of ‘modernists’ calling for improvements in mobility and rapid reaction, therefore, seemed to be the most significant at this point (Bukkvoll 2011: 701). The ‘modernists’ perceived need to balance defence requirements with financial possibilities was also echoed by Putin in his early years as president, as noted in chapter 2. Following rising international tensions in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea, however, priorities changed, as Bukkvoll observed in a follow-up work, because the West and NATO had ‘re-entered the stage as the main threat to Russian security’. This resulted in a partial reversal of the move from divisions to brigades on Russia’s Western flank, indicating a reorientation back towards the ‘traditionalist’ camp (Bukkvoll 2016b).
The difficulty of identifying the exact influence of various strands of thinking prevalent in the Russian strategic community on military policy is salient for contextualizing the continuing debate on Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ capabilities. Following the annexation of Crimea, a number of Western analysts tried to trace back the origins of Russia’s perceived ‘hybrid warfare’ approach to the writings of specific military thinkers. In particular, a now well-known article authored in 2013 by the Chief of General Staff, Valerii Gerasimov, caught the attention of various observers (Gerasimov 2013). Although neither Ukraine nor ‘hybrid warfare’ were mentioned in the article, it became known as the ‘Gerasimov doctrine’ and Gerasimov himself as ‘the face of the hybrid approach’ (Snegovaya 2015). As various experts specializing in Russian strategic thought later noted, the identification of Gerasimov’s article as the origin of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ thinking is selective and ignorant of how it fits into wider developments in Russian military thinking. Within this context, Gerasimov’s ideas are not as ‘new’ as often asserted (Persson 2017: 2). As Charles Bartles showed, rather than revealing a ‘new’ way of war, Gerasimov outlined his views on the evolving trends in Western and US approaches to warfare, which he traces back to the 1991 Gulf War. Outlining his view of future military operations, he envisioned ‘less large-scale warfare; increased used of networked command-and-control systems, robotics and highprecision weaponry’ (Bartles 2016: 36). As such, the article was a clear continuation of ‘revolutionary’ thinking on the future of warfare and sixth-generation war.
A similar assessment has been made of a second piece hailed as a blueprint for the Crimea operation – an article entitled ‘The nature and content of a new-generation war’, written by two officers of the Russian General Staff Academy, S.G. Chekinov and S.A. Bogdanov in 2013 (e.g., Perry 2015). Defining the twenty-first century as the ‘age of high-tech wars’, their thoughts, according to Timothy Thomas, were by no means an innovation. Instead, he noted that ‘Slipchenko’s work [on sixth-generation warfare] may be considered as a (or the!) most important source behind much of the new-generation warfare thinking and postulating of Bogdanov and Chekinov’ (2016: 555). This is not to say that there were no notable new ideas in these articles to justify the attention they received. Both articles’ authors highlighted the growing importance of non-military tools (such as sanctions, political pressure and information campaigns) in contemporary warfare which, in their view, now exceeded the potency of physical military force. This did not indicate, however, that they no longer saw conventional capabilities as essential or that Russian strategists intended ‘to remove, as far as possible, displays of “hard military power” from modern warfare with “war” becoming something fought at “arm’s length” without the need to engage with adversary’s forces’, as Rod Thornton has cautioned (2015: 44). As Frederik Westerlund and Johan Norberg pointed out, even during the Crimea operation, the display of ‘hard military power’ in the form of a 150,000-man snap exercise near the area of operation was part of the mix to ensure Russia’s potential to dominate escalation and to deter interference or response from either Ukraine or NATO (2016: 591).